Mario Kart 8 is finally with us, and sees Nintendo experimenting in one of the areas they typically lag behind in versus their home console rivals – that of online features. The latest entry in Nintendo’s kart franchise allows players to save and edit replays and, surpisingly, upload them directly to Youtube. I’ve spent a bit of time over the last couple of days toying with the functionality, and thought I’d share some of my results. To begin with, below is my very first MK8 upload.

Options are fairly limited for edits; you can choose which drivers to focus on, but can’t direct the replay camera yourself, for instance, and while you can view a full-race replay on your Wii U, uploads are limited to either 30, 45 or 60 second montages. You can tell the console to focus on different aspects of the racing, such as drifting, weapon hits and others, and using the sticks or buttons you can either speed up or slow down the action. The negative here is that those changes in playback speed unfortunately don’t make it into the uploaded clip.

Happily, the software that creates your clips handles camera angles and edits really well, giving your footage some great views, like the elevated hairpin in my Mario Circuit clip below. While you can’t get particularly hands-on with the captured video feed, you can at least trust the game to do a pretty decent job of preserving those moments you want to save for posterity.

So I’d say it’s a bit bare-bones from my short time with it, though I haven’t yet delved into the ‘Mario Kart TV’ option on the main menu to see if a more fully-featured system is hidden away in there – something to explore later. For now, I will say that it’s a nice additional feature that hopefully points to Nintendo embracing the internet a bit more as they move forward.

Of course, I’m sure a certain amount of scepticism will be in order, given Nintendo’s actions towards Let’s Players last year, and it’s telling that all of my MK8 uploads were tagged with copyright notices the second they went up – whether this is down to Nintendo themselves or Google’s automatic content-sweeping I don’t know. I’m sure someone more knowledgeable about that situation will dig a bit deeper. I don’t monetise my videos, so I’m not personally losing out, and anyone that does likely understands the situation far better than I do.

For now, Enjoy this four-minute replay of Star Cup 100cc that I put together, and if you like what you see, keep an eye on my Mario Kart 8 replay playlist here.

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It does look like a lot of fun! I am excited to play this. The time limit it allows you to upload is a little short, what is a shame, as I want to see more footage. But I guess its not the end of the world! ….. I hope?!?!?! :O